“Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?”

“Beneath these was a small silver-edged photo album, and Emma breathed in at the sight of the engraved names: Tommy and Emma. She found herself smiling; she'd known somehow that he would have been a Tommy. And if he'd never had the chance to become any of the other things she'd imagined for him, she was happy that at least he'd had that.”

“It didn’t help that she was right; when had that ever made anything better?”

“The stories had become a part of her by then; they stuck to her bones like a good meal, bloomed inside of her like a garden. They were as deep and meaningful as any other trait Dad had passed along to her: her blue eyes, her straw-colored hair, the sprinkling of freckles across her nose.”

“It wasn't that we forgot. But things like that sometimes get stored away, and there never seems to be a good time to dig them up again. It hurts a lot less to keep them buried. That doesn't make it right, but it's just the way it is.”

“She understands now what she, in all her worry, had forgotten. That even as she hesitates and wavers, even as she thinks too much and moves too cautiously, she doesn't always have to get it right. It's okay to look back, even as you move forward.”

“I never said I was good,” he told her, taking the pen. “Just that I liked doing it.”“That’s the best kind of good.”